Arencibia Lands in Texas

Credit: Tom Szczerbowski-USA TODAY Sports

Well it seems the Texas Rangers will end up with J.P. Arencibia after all. As it became known earlier in the week the Rangers almost agreed to a trade for the former Jays backstop but couldn’t reach terms on a deal with him at the time before the non tender deadline passed on Monday.

While we already knew his time had come to and end in Toronto its nice that his saga has come to an end.

As confirmed by the Ken Rosenthal as seen below, the deal is for one year at $1.8 million plus incentives. So if anyone ever tells you that you can’t be the absolute worst person to do your job ever and still get a 300% raise you can tell them to stick this in their pipe and smoke it.

This means the Rangers will be saving at least $0.7 million and possibly the full million off of what he would have made in arbitration, plus they were also able to hang on to whatever they would have had to give up to the Jays in order to acquire him, so Jon Daniels is looking like a winner of sorts with this deal. Although if Arencibia puts up numbers like he did last year he could pay them and it would still be a bad deal.

As part of a tandem with Geovany Soto Arencibia is likely to see far less playing time in 2014 which really was his greatest downfall here in Toronto, A catcher of his ilk in a backup role is actually not too hard to stomach.

Moving to Texas might bode well for Arencibia whose ability to knock a mistake pitch out of the park will get a boost from moving to the hitter friendly Rangers’ Ballpark in Arlington. However unless playing in the sweltering Texas heat makes him think twice about wildly flailing at any pitch he sees he is still likely to remain a low batting average low on base guy that offers a fair bit of power from a position where that is definitely in short supply.

I don’t expect him to pull an Aaron Hill on the Jays and become a productive player once again, because he hasn’t ever been one outside of AAA, however hopefully this move works out well for him as it does for Toronto. He’ll now have new analysts to feud with, maybe take another whack at the whole Twitter thing, and just get out of this city where he had built up a fair bit of tension and bad blood with his lack of humility and lack of being any good.

Happy trails to you J.P and always remember to swing away.